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I'm not really sure what everyone is bitching about. What apps are not running or rendering correctly? I'm running R500 (X1600) on Macbook Pro. The OSS driver is much better behaved than the proprietary driver ever was for me. I have always had a video tearing problem with FGLRX but none with the OSS driver. I'm running 2.6.33-rc8 and DRM / Mesa / xf68-video-ati from git and am quite happy with the progress of the driver stack.

Radeon is much more stable than fglrx ever was on either my laptop's 200M or my backup desktop's 9800pro. 2D is fast and 3D actually works. Support for those chips with radeon is much better at the moment than on r6xx/r7xx hardware anyway (they got more advanced OpenGL functionality in the driver, but that means squat when most applications end up crashing or having glitches).

I you want fglrx support then buy a new laptop, you can't expect AMD to support old junk forever. Besides fglrx isn't really that good, in fact it's quite a horrible driver. So I don't really understand these comments of 'being stuck' with the oss driver. I guess the grass is always greener on the other side, or at least that's what people tend to think.

I think he was talking about dwindling support for the current OSS driver:

i dont think id be so worried if i kept seeing a steady stream of improvements to my incomplete driver;

But, thanks for offering to buy us owners of old notebooks, brand new laptops! So nice of you! When do I get mine?

Heck, doom3 runs better on my x850 and x1900 (an extra 10 fps in demo1 on the x1900) than it does on a HD4850, all using the open source driver. I can also use the highest quality textures on NWN with the two former cards, something still not supported on the HD one. I'm quite happy with the progress being made with the r300 driver.

In terms of hardware (i.e. stopping production) GPUs generally EOL very quickly, since there's not much point in continuing to manufacture something that's slower and built on a larger process node than the latest-and-greatest.

In terms of software/drivers, AMD hasn't dropped support of R500 and earlier, they just aren't releasing new versions of their closed-source driver (lord knows why you'd want them to; it's buggy enough when it only has to focus on *new* cards! ). The OSS driver soldiers on, with plenty of development work being done by AMD. In fact, they're making sure the R300-500 Gallium driver is working before they start on the R600+ driver.